In honour of
Little Women, a journey through Saoirse Ronan's major (and some minor) filmography:
Atonement (2007): Where it all began, one magical gathering of talents that produced one of the best tragedies (and literary adaptations) of the 21st century. It's kind of hilarious, looking back, that at the time Keira Knightley was the only really recognizable name in the cast (excepting, of course, Vanessa Redgrave), when you consider not just Ronan but also James McAvoy, Benedict Cumberbatch, and even Alfie Allen in a minor role. Ronan is only one of three actresses playing her role, and in terms of screentime I think Romola Garai is probably comparable, but it's telling of how talented she is that she's the one who dominates people's memory of the film. But beyond her, Knightley and McAvoy have seldom if ever been better, and the production, costume design, and so on are exquisite. Joe Wright does more with Dunkirk in six minutes than Christopher Nolan did with an entire film. And that
Dario Marianelli score!
The Lovely Bones (2009): Hot off that Oscar nomination, Ronan scores the lead role in a Peter Jackson adaptation of a bestselling novel! Alas...while I admire Jackson's overstuffed
King Kong, his dark decade truly began here. This is just a misjudged film on almost every level, from the often-inexplicable tone to many of the performances; Mark Wahlberg, who can be good in dramatic parts with the right direction, is left completely adrift here. Ronan emerges unscathed from the proceedings, at least.
The Way Back (2010): I remember this from the 2010 season because awards reporter/blogger Kris Tapley was a big booster of the film, but it never went anywhere (aside from a Best Makeup Oscar nomination), and it never came to Island theatres, so I didn't get to see it at the time and never made it a priority in subsequent years. Of the three movies I watched as part of this project that I had never seen before, this is handily the best. Based on a memoir that is almost certainly a pack of lies (but who cares, it's a good story), we follow a group of gulag internees who escape and trek from Siberia across Mongolia and China to reach British India and freedom. They aren't actually being pursued (that we can see) for most of the movie, so this is a man vs. nature film, covering terrain so hazardous that crossing the Himalayas on foot in wintertime is treated like an afterthought. Our leading man is Jim Sturgess, this being toward the tail end of the brief window where he was being measured for stardom. The ending feels very rushed. Really great nature cinematography is a highlight of the film, and Ronan is adorable. It's a shame that it increasingly looks like this will be director Peter Weir's last film, as he hasn't done anything in the decade since.
Hanna (2011): Ronan re-teams with director Joe Wright for her second lead film role, and first good lead film role; also one of her few forays into the action genre, and certainly the most successful of the bunch, starring as the ever-popular teen girl supersoldier character type we'd seen a few more times onscreen in the decade to follow. I don't think Wright is necessarily a natural action director, but his approach is entertainingly weird a lot of the time, and there's a really good single-take fight with Eric Bana at one point. And it's a rare film where Tom Hollander gets to play the heavy.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): I would say that this is the best film that Ronan has appeared in to date, even if it's not one of the films I would especially identify as highlighting her talents the most. She slots nicely into Wes Anderson's comic deadpan universe, and gets to use her natural Irish accent on film for the first time because Anderson openly did not give a damn about that kind of consistency in his fictional eastern Europe -- and it's remarkable how successful this gambit is, frankly; you never think about how Tony Revolori and F. Murray Abraham are notionally playing the same character but look and sound nothing alike. Really, this is just a sublime piece of filmmaking, comfortably in my top five of the past decade, and while I think
Moonrise Kingdom is my favourite Anderson film, this is his most mature and weighty story. It's a rare screwball comedy that ends by informing the audience that two-thirds of the protagonists died shortly afterward, but that's the sort of thing I find myself wondering about in later years when, e.g., watching everybody happy in Budapest in the 1940 film
The Shop Around the Corner.
Brooklyn (2015): Irish accent #2! Released at the tail end of the Obama era, and right before things like the migrant crisis, Brexit, etc. could have factored into its development, looking back on this four years later I wonder how much more politicized a film like this might seem if it were released today, being as it is such a warm immigrant fable (with a white immigrant, of course, so maybe FOX News would hold its fire). This shares with
Grand Budapest not just that she gets to be Irish, but also gives her more of a straightforward charming love story angle; albeit with a lot more angst and drama here, which she of course plays well. Lots of good acting in the supporting cast, and both of her prospective love interests are handled as viable options, which is something you seldom see in these sorts of stories. And the use of colour in the film is quite stunning, very much like the better Technicolour films from the era in which it's set.
Lady Bird (2017): Ronan teams up with Greta Gerwig for the first time (one hopes there will be a third collaboration in the near future) for this very astutely-made, semiautobiographical account of teenage life in the early 2000s. I admire the way that Gerwig includes little hints about what's happening in the lives of other people, but never strays too far from Lady Bird, since she's not really aware of what's going on with everybody else, so the audience isn't either; it makes everyone feel like they're a rounded person, even if we only see facets of them. So many great lines in this, and expertly delivered. This is of course one of her more recent films, so I'd seen it much more recently some some of the others.
On Chesil Beach (2018): Back to where things started, another Ian McEwan adaptation, this time with the author himself penning the screenplay. Unfortunately, this is easily the weakest of the films I watched as part of this weeklong journey. I've seen some people complain about the way
Little Women plays with narrative chronology, which I wholeheartedly disagree with, but if you want an example of how you can do that in ways that disrupt the story and don't add anything, this would be a much better example. The pivotal sequence where the main couple attempt to consummate their marriage does not benefit from being cut to pieces with flashbacks to their whole relationship up until that point. The acting is solid, as you'd expect, but somebody made the decision that Ronan and Eddie Redmayne-lookalike Billy Howle should play themselves in the 45-years-later epilogue, and...yeah, that did not work at all.